Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA
Mohammed Sami, Apocrypha, installation view @PHCA

Mohammed Sami was born in Baghdad, Iraq, 1984. He studied drawing and painting at The Institute of Fine Arts, Baghdad, Iraq 2005. He immigrated to Sweden in 2007. Later, in 2015 he earned a bachelor with honour degree from Ulster University-Belfast school of art, Northern Ireland. He has completed his master degree of fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, 2018. Mohammed lives and works between London and Norrköping, Sweden. In an attempt to use the medium painting as an instrument to find a metaphorical representation against the striking image of conflict and violence -Mohammed Sami paintings aim to explore the belated response to the trauma and memory since he immigrated to Sweden as a refugee from his native Iraq.
 
 

Rather than using the theme of trauma as a testimony to the Iraq conflict, which he witnessed first-hand, Sami deployed the painting to articulate to the war and memory obliquely. Sami tries to create a complex relationship between the original event and its present recollection that turns the traditional categories of painting such as still-life, internal-external spaces, and landscapes turn into triggers,  strange or threatening in his artworks.
 
Sami applied the index and pun as delusive signifiers as well as the historical harmonic composition to free the painting from the need of imitating reality and its time-honoured. Therefore, the paintings often appear to be about something else other than the source of the trauma to allow the context to be transitive to the viewers as opposed to being didactic. However, the affective nature of the transaction in his paintings does not force itself to convey a concrete message, but it offers a jolt that does not so much reveal the truth as thrust us involuntarily into a mode of critical inquiry.

Sami’s artworks attempt to challenge the typical image of suffering and aim to provide another perspective to the war and its effect while offers a slow and often personal reading through the complex painterly interplay of the daily objects, atmosphere, textures, and costumes - to evoke the widespread sense of loss and conflicts that inhabit cultures collectively.